HBO Voyeur

Posted in: Design & user experience Exceptional experiences Integrated advertising on July 14, 2007 at 8:27 pm |

BBDO has create a very ambitious site for HBO called Voyeur. The site is basically a building-size “peep show” that lets you see into the drama and comedy of the lives of residents in each apartment simultaneously. I talked with some of the guys at BBDO and found out that each individual apartment film is a single-take performance and they did it to heighten the realism and conceit of “window peeping”. The events are compressed and choreographed so that that in four uninterrupted minutes we witness a birth, a death, the end of a marriage, the spark of a love affair, the disintegration of a fashionable social clique, the growing up of young men & women, the discovery of a grisly murder and the defense of a gay love nest. You can also customize the music and choose different genres which creates different moods, tones and ultimately different experiences.

Probably the most interesting thing is that the site is also going to be extended through content created for HBO On Demand and HBO Mobile. I think this use of multiple channel is really smart since most of the people who would be engaged by this site have fragmented medium consumption. Studies have shown this pattern for several years but this campaign does a really good job of finally taking advantage of it.

It is an interesting an ambitious site but all of this video content does come at a cost with a long load time that could be an obstacle to a lot of people. But if you make it past the load time the content will sucks you and make it a worth while experience.